Smarter cities to be built around shared mobility: Raj Rao, chief executive of Ford Smart Mobility

What we mean by making cities smarter is create more options for people to move more freely, which may involve actually less vehicles over time, he said.Sharmistha Mukherjee | ET Bureau | September 21, 2017, 11:25 IST

With urbanisation and congestion on the rise, American carmaker Ford Motor has started engaging with government bodies to identify traffic solutions and create smarter cities. Raj Rao, the chief executive of Ford Smart Mobility, says shared mobility will play an increasingly important role in the transformation towards better transport solutions. The automaker, he tells Sharmistha Mukherjee, plans to be a part of this journey to grow sustainably. Excerpts:

The vision behind the experiments Ford Smart Mobility is undertaking?When you think about the city of tomorrow, the kind of expectations consumers have about what companies need to try out in that world is not limited to just being a vehicle manufacturer. They expect you to be a service innovator so that they have more reasons to buy a vehicle. I think all the work we have been doing through these experiments is learning about that aspiration. How people want to travel, how they want a relationship to evolve over time, what are they prepared to give up in terms of data so that you can be more responsive, how you respond to that cohesively at a city level... It's a big challenge because with urbanisation, people are coming to cities at an unprecedented pace ... if we don't say we have the same aspiration of providing cities which are thriving ­ that attract growth, jobs, eliminate accidents, make journeys more predictable, dynamic ­ then we are going to create roadblocks to our success.

You may be making brilliant vehicles, but people don't enjoy it as there is chaos on the road...What we mean by making cities smarter is create more options for people to move more freely, which may involve actually less vehicles over time. Less vehicles, more journeys, more interesting ways of using vehicles and a whole new service ecosystem.

No two cities are similar. How do you tailor solutions to meet market needs?Some of the goals (for cities) may be very easy to understand -address congestion, add mobility capacity, reduce pollution, and make the city more attractive for people to come and enjoy than just do their job. We believe one of the things we could contribute over there is the idea of first mile and last mile. The second is the business model. Your car is part of work, but there are certain times of the day when your car is not working ... So putting a car that people have in a city on a common shared platform makes a lot of sense. Just like a train should not belong to an in dividual, it is a service, we think over time, where more vehicles will be shared.

What is the kind of work you are doing in India?Our view here is that there is a new vision for India, which in 2015 was formally defined by NITI Aayog. On the vision of city of the future, three things were (made) clear. More things have to be shared in mobility, more cars will have to be electrified over a period of time and they have to be connected. That is the DNA of change for India. Very few countries have done that; that is inspiring. We made a decision that we should leverage that opportunity to really understand what the higher aspiration that India wants to achieve is.And, Ford wants to be a part of it.

What is your understanding of India's strengths and challenges that will surface while adopting future mobility solutions?The big positive is the user demand.We are talking about a market that has 1.3 billion population. Of this, 32 per cent are aged under 20, they have not reached the productive years yet. So, if we think about 2050, I imagine India would be the largest economy in the world that can resolve any bottlenecks. We have that kind of opportunity and you have a dynamic government and you have citizens who are connected to the best ideas in the world then great things happen.

India will leapfrog like it did with the telecom sector, banking and the railways with Shinkansen coming in a few years from now. The world is there to enable all this simply because of the size of the market.

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